What role has the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe played in monitoring the conflict?
The Minsk agreements did not create a dedicated monitoring mechanism for the peace process in Ukraine. Instead, the Normandy Four came to rely on the existing international organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), for information about what was happening in the Donbas.
The OSCE was founded during the Cold War, when the two opposing camps attempted in the mid-1970s to establish basic international and humanitarian values on which they could agree. Because of the bipolarity during the Cold War, the United States and Canada were among the founding members of what was originally called the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Following the collapse of communism in Europe, the OSCE reinvented itself as an intergovernmental organization tracking the state of democracy and security in Europe. It provides a platform for international observers monitoring elections and documenting armistice violations in longterm armed conflicts.In Ukraine, the OSCE played an important role in election monitoring during the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. Unhappy with the revolution's outcome and the OSCE's activities in the former Soviet republics more generally, in 2007 President Putin accused the organization of promoting Western strategic interests there. Russia then started developing its involvement with the OSCE, hoping to influence the organization's reporting from the region and its resulting decisions.
The OSCE established its Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine in March 2014 on the invitation of the new Ukrainian authorities. From an early contingent of about a hundred international monitors (plus Ukrainian technical personnel), within a year the mission's size increased to some 500 monitors and, as of April 2020, it consisted of 750 unarmed civilian monitors from 45 states; some 600 of them were stationed in the Donbas.2 Russia has prevented OSCE monitors from entering the Crimea.
The mission played an important role in the war's initial years by helping to undermine Russia's official pretense of non-involvement. In 2015 and 2016 particularly, the mission reported numerous cases of Russian military personnel and equipment crossing the border into the Donbas, being directly involved in the fighting there, and even sending soldiers' remains back to Russia. There were cases of Russian and pro-Russian paramilitaries detaining OSCE monitors and of Russian troops shooting down OSCE drones over the Donbas.
In later years, however, the OSCE mission faced criticisms in Ukraine. The mandate of a Special Mission is not limited to observing the situation on the ground; monitors are also supposed to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid and help establish dialogue between warring factions. It is in this latter capacity that the OSCE mission sometimes crossed the line between recording facts and fraternizing with one side in the conflict. Ukrainian sources have reported that monitors allowed pro-Russian fighters to use their cars, painted white with OSCE markings, and attended the wedding of a separatist warlord—facts the mission has acknowledged with regret. The Ukrainian media has also aired more far-reaching claims about observers deliberately turning a blind eye to Russia's military actions or even feeding data about the location of Ukrainian units to enemy artillery posts.
It is not widely known in the West that a significant share of the OSCE monitors in Ukraine are Russian citizens and that some of them have military backgrounds (which is also true of Western monitors). Most countries involved in staffing this special mission send only a token number of observers, but the Russian representation is consistently one of the largest, and some post-Soviet states closely allied with Russia also send their monitors. In at least one known case in 2015, a Russian monitor was forced to resign after the media revealed his service record in Russian military intelligence.
In 2018 the mission reported a security breach when an employee allegedly provided the Russian Federal Security Service with details concerning some monitors' personal lives and financial situations.In October 2018 the long-serving deputy head of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, the Swiss Alexander Hug, who was about to leave his position in Ukraine, gave an interview to the influential US magazine and news resource Foreign Policy. When asked about the Russian presence in the Donbas, he began his answer with the unfortunate sentence, “If the question is what we have seen on the ground, we would not see direct evidence.” Nevertheless, he went on to describe all kinds of direct and indirect proof of Russian involvement his monitors had recorded. But the Russian media had a field day with Hug's opening statement, trumpeting that this was an acknowledgment of Western and Ukrainian lies about the Donbas and conveniently ignoring the rest of the interview. At Hug's urging, Foreign Policy removed the offending sentence “as it did not convey his intended point of view,” but the incident only underscored the hybrid nature of the war, in which the belligerents fight over interpretations as much as they do over the control of territory.3 To many Ukrainians, the scandal merely confirmed their suspicions about widespread pro-Russian sentiment among OSCE monitors.